The three Aussie shopping centres most popular with Chinese tourists

For every 100 Chinese tourists on a long-term holiday to Australia, 15 will set foot in Sydney’s Chatswood Chase shopping centre three or more times.

New research shows the shopping centre in Sydney’s northern suburbs is the most popular shopping centre in NSW for Chinese travellers visiting for more than 30 days.

Chatswood Chase is the most popular shopping centre for Chinese travellers.

Queensland’s Pacific Fair on the Gold Coast ranked as top in Queensland on this measure, with Victoria’s being the QV Centre in Melbourne CBD.

Singtel Group’s Australian data arm DSpark undertook the analysis for outdoor advertising company oOh!media, which owns advertising assets in suburban shopping centres, by using location data from phones where sim cards were bought in major Chinese cities.

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Chinese tourists are big business for advertisers, with 1.6 million visiting Australia in 2017, spending more than $10 billion on local goods and services during their trip, oOh!media chief marketing officer Michaela Chan said.

“We want to be able to reach travellers at the airport and beyond,” Ms Chan said.

The Australia China Business Council has tipped Chinese tourism to Australia to triple to 3.3 million people a year by 2026.

The new data shows popular suburbs, roads travelled and key shopping locations, allowing brands to pick the best spots to advertise.

When overlaid with demographic statistics, it shows many of the visitors were in areas with significant Chinese populations.

Chinese tourists spent the longest time in Pacific Fair on the Gold Coast above any other shopping centre, at 109 minutes.

Macquarie Centre and Chadstone in Melbourne’s Malvern East also ranked well for length of time in the centre, at 72 minutes and 46 minutes respectively.

This outpaced Myer Melbourne and Sydney QVB, which both had an average around 25 minutes.

The population of Broadbeach Waters, a tourist hub and the location of Pacific Fair, is 1 per cent Chinese.

About 14 per cent of the population in Sydney’s North Ryde, home to Macquarie Centre, has Chinese ancestry. Chatswood’s population is about a third Chinese.

Other businesses have also tapped into Australian hunger for Chinese business.DaigouSales is an eMarketplace integrated with Chinese social media platform WeChat, which has three million users in Australia and 963 million monthly active users worldwide.

Mathew McDougall, who founded the site in 2017, said many tourists, students and new immigrants are asked to buy goods to take back to China. This is known as ‘daigou’.